


Winter

by newcanaan



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Blood and Violence, Joel voice: Eulllie, Suicide mention
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-03-21 06:51:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13735452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newcanaan/pseuds/newcanaan
Summary: post-autumn, might run into winter?? following right after the events of left behind*under construction*





	1. Chapter 1

When the girl woke up on the septic floor of the plaza she did not know that death was walking beside her. It had become too much for her, for the world perhaps, that it was no more than white noise.    
And there came the clicking sound, a bestial manifestation of a human heartbeat.

She pulled the 9mm up to the creature’s head. One shot would put it down.

It stared back blindly at her – a horrific sight that reached down to the pit of the stomach – with the cancerous bouquet blossoming from the bone of its skull, lined with vibrant fire like the sprawling wings of fireflies, burning up in the dark. Look for the light, they told her. She couldn’t look away.

They only had two bullets left. Ellie held her breath. Some things were better left living, she decided, still clutching the gun nonetheless.   
There was a security in its weight she could not let go of, not just in the leaded rage of its mortality in her own hand, but the quiet trust with which Joel had handed it to her. If she lost it now, it would be like losing a part of her own body. And they could take that from her kicking and screaming.

The clicker shook its head and stumbled, traipsing along the store. How had it even gotten in? She’d made sure to lock up all the doors and windows - but there was light streaming in from the far corner.

Ellie crawled closer, her body stiff with cold. Sleep had fallen so heavily on her that night.   
The doubt was clouding her mind, and she kept telling herself she shouldn’t have fallen asleep in such a dangerous place. If she hadn’t, thought, exhaustion would have overcome her from the days and days of it. When would they find shelter? From that place, from those men?

Her hand had reached the scorch marks across the wall; it might have been a hunter who had done the damage in some half-assed attempt to break the wall down, before she hailed them with arrows in bloody panic. As time had passed by, the bricks must have fallen free. Either that, or the clickers forced their way in.

“Assholes,” she cursed. The clicker turned.

Ellie clenched her jaw.

Barking back again, the infected ambled off on some other pursuit, turning in circles until somebody came and put it out of its misery.

They couldn’t risk any more coming through. The girl followed it down the corridor for some time to make sure it was out the way, then doubled backed on herself. The air was sharp with frost and the smell of decay.   
They shouldn’t have come after her then. Desperate people do desperate things.

Flat on the floor was the man, blood drying to black on his chest, grey flecked in his hair. There was a moment where a terrible fear filled her chest, in which time seemed to pause for her pain, because the man was not breathing.

Ellie ran to his side. She shook him by the shoulders, “Joel, Joel?”

The man felt like dead weight. And then she saw his stomach rise with breath, and fell back with relief. “Oh, God.” She still had the gun in her hand. Had she taken it out again, or was it always there, she couldn’t remember. “Oh, God.” Ellie consoled her by wrapping her arms over her knees.

She recalled with vivid ferocity the blind surgeon’s work she had done the night before, lit only by the dying torchlight, her hands shaking something wild and the antiseptic stinging the cuts on her hands. His chest had been glistening in front of her. She wanted to be sick.   
But someone braver than her seemed to take her unsteady hands and sew the man back together, before she bolted to the counter and threw her guts up on the floor. Then she had bandaged him up like some old relic to be left underground, to be left in the hallowed space of that plaza, and perhaps years later they would discover him there. Ellie had to preserve him in that way. She could not let him die, and what the hell was she doing thinking she could cure him.   
Joel was still alive. He would not leave her like the others.

In the fever of her sleep she had made him swear not to leave her. Behind her close eyes, she was burning up inside.

The morning seemed awfully serene in comparison. Ellie was messing up her shoelaces but she hadn’t yet realised.

They had to leave as soon as they could. Those kinds of places were cursed for her.

Pulling up a piece of boarding from the wall, she hefted him onto it and tied him down, then took the other end of rope. They were making more noise than she would have wanted, but there didn’t seem to be many more clickers around, and those that were had a bounty of soldiers to feed on anyway.

Once they had cleared the main hall, the girl took him the most direct route she could find to save the trouble of barricades and ladders.

The hardest part was getting him onto Callus; at least the horse was patient enough to stand there as she did.

With Joel tied down in front of her, they started along the paved road from the plaza. The wind was heavy with snow, settling on the carcasses of cars and brickwork, the dead lights and living earth.

A footpath once adorned with flowerbeds and a pavilion was now the host of three runners. Beneath them, the body of a man was being stripped away. His corpse was snapped and curled up in the ghastly cold, and his blood was congealing around their mouths as they tasted him.

Ellie pulled her hood up. As long as they stayed distracted, she didn’t much care.

They rode for perhaps three or four miles, with the two of them below a patchwork blanket soon set with snow. Ellie shook them free of it – she didn’t like the feeling of her grave growing around her. Then why, she wondered, did it seem warmer?

The road had carried on through a few acres past forests alone; there was what seemed to be an old hideout at the end of a dirt track and she decided the risk of any inhabitants was less than them perishing to death out there. Nature had its certainties like that.

The girl brought Callus to what was left of the shed, and pulled Joel onto the hay pile to stop him falling. “Wait here,” she whispered. The horse watched her with its bold, dark eyes.

There were no footprints along the walkway at the back of the house. That had to be a good sign – unless they had just locked themselves in to wait out the snowstorm. It was falling on her eyelashes, blinding her already.

What if someone had turned in there for her, though, starved death waiting for her to open the door? They did not have a choice. It had dropped below minus ten.    
Holding the pistol ready, she tried the back door. It was locked.

“Shit.” It was too cold for her pick it in any good time.

Reaching through the cat flap, she felt the counter for the key. The edge of it ran against the surface. Fumbling, she pushed it an inch away, until her whole shoulder was through, and she reeled it back before she lost it completely.

Her hood drawn, she opened the door.

It made a slight creak– which alerted nothing inside, nothing alive anyway. The girl stepped inside.

In the shed, Joel shuddered.

The house, at least, seemed deserted. A thin layer of dust had accumulated until the place was grey, and the floorboards were rotting in the corners. By the windowsill was a vase of dead flowers. They had just withered there like an old woman’s fingers.

A thud down the corridor made her jump. Ellie turned on the torch.

It hadn’t come from the living room, she saw from the corner of her eye, maybe it had been upstairs.

She stopped in her tracks. There, not a breath away from her, was the door under the stairs.

She was running out of time, only some primitive fear had thrown her into shock, and for a minute she was no better than the rest of the antiques waiting in the empty house.

There was a patter of fingers on the other side. Whose patience was being tested?

Ellie pulled the door open.

The light hit the back of two eyes, wide, moon-like, and the frill of amber spooling down its head.

She fired a round, as the creature lunged at her. It was the size of a child.

The wound in its stomach made it squeal.

Ellie tried to throw it off but it was strong – impossibly strong for such a small thing – and was pinning her arms down. The gun was knocked back.

The clicker bore its weight onto her, its flesh seeping from the tear in its stomach and onto her own. Ellie reached over her head and felt nothing there.

Its teeth grazed her neck. Around its eyes, the flesh had peeled all the way back. The girl kicked it off before it crushed her chest.

Breath hurried down her throat again and made her body flourish with blood. She ran for the gun. The clicker ran after her.

Her fingers scratched down the floorboards – she snatched it in the middle of those desperate seconds, where the hot breath of hell was on her heels, where she thought this might be the place where she died.

Ellie was on her back, the gun in one hand. If she had been quick, she might have fired then. But it came faster than she ever could have imagined. Arms out, it reached for her.

The rope snapped it back.

Scrambling away, Ellie got to her feet. She fired the last bullet and the clicker hit the floor.

“Oh, man.” She doubled over to catch her breath. That thing must have been as old as her, it was what she might have looked like if she’d been infected too. It looked like Riley.

When she straightened up again the blood had reached her feet. It pooled around her trainers, dark like sap, something to taint with the flurries of snow.  

Ellie stepped around it. The clicker was dead, that was for certain, but only because of the harness of rope tied over it, reaching into the back of the cupboard under the stairs.

Her expression darkened.

Ellie traced it all the back. The clicker had frayed it in parts to free itself – before it had given up and sat in the dark for its own eternity. Who does that, the words seemed to pound in her head. She checked the wound on her neck. It hadn’t broken the skin, but the feel of its teeth touching her would be enough to give her nightmares for the next few weeks, if they survived that long.

Out in the snow, Callus whinnied. She better hurry up.

“You better not be bullshitting!” she whispered, cutting the clicker loose. It rolled out into the billowing snow, hitting a stump unceremoniously. Maybe scavengers would find it. Maybe not. That wasn’t for her to think about.

Then Ellie took her knife out and went upstairs. The ominous uncertainty of a staircase in the dark revived a child-like fear that nobody ever really grew out of. She swore that the hardest thing to do was go up there alone, at night, with the shadows running after her.

“Endure and survive,” she whispered under her breath. It seemed wasted on an old staircase like that, the host of her reckless steps into oblivion.

But there were no more surprises waiting for her upstairs, thank God. An untouched bedroom and a bathroom with a few things left in it. Ellie searched through the pill bottles: most of them were expired but they’d have to do.

Once she’d made sure every room was empty, Ellie led the horse to the back door.

There was the drag marks on the floor from the body and her nails, beneath the stench of fear. 

It was only when she got Joel lying on the settee and the fire growing beside him that she let out a breath. She did not want to think about those last few days. She did not want to think about anything.  

Ellie looked across at Joel. There was some colour returning to his face again, flushing him red across his cheeks. That enough seemed like a miracle. Miracles those days didn’t demand much.

It was better to start looking for supplies before anything else. She did not know when something would come crashing through the door.

In the kitchen, she found a couple of tins of food, some oats for Callus (which were half rotten, but she’d have to be forgiven for that), bottles of beer and water and a spare knife and fork. It was the things like that which were the hardest to come by, the ones nobody really thought about.  

Up the stairs, there was the blanket on the bed that she could put over Joel if he got too cold – but the fire would do for now, and she didn’t want him to get warm too quickly.   
He seemed to be jumping from one extreme to the next like that, knowing there was just as much chance of dying in here as there was out there. Ellie pulled at the shutter.

It looked like a cruel sky out there. Bruised blue and purple, lashing out at the trees. Why had the owners ever left this place? Because of the kid?   
The wind was picking up by the minute, howling at the walls of the house and begging to be let in. It was a wild animal. She drew all the blackout curtains closed.

Ellie took down a few extra shirts to pack away later, then knelt down by the bath. They surely wouldn’t have running water anymore. But they had a fire.  

She found a pot under the sink, an iron cast thing that weighed about a tonne.

After she gathered some snow for melting, she took a glass jug from the counter and began filling the tub with colder water too. It might have taken her near half an hour, but a steaming bath was worth that.

Ellie sank into the water. The blistering fingers of the heat on her skin were at first unbearable, and at any other time she’d swear she was being burned alive.   
It hurried the blood back through her veins. Her heart was stammering in its place. She raised her hand and watched the mud roll off of her.

The fire stoked in her chest was making her feel human again; out there in the cold, they were no better than the infected, they slouched through the endless barren plains, blinded by white and moaning from the pain of living. The girl let it overcome her.

Water filled her mouth and her eyes and began to run through her nose.

Ellie broke the surface. Slumped forward, her collarbones were knife edges of hunger, her back a mess of bruising and aching. She stayed there in the grey murk, her head low, with the steam rising off of the water.  

Her grief was a living thing in her chest, more living than her, that stretched and kicked out against her inside. There were wounds lining her heart and lungs, the pain of Tess’s blood, of Sam behind the door that morning, or the earthly sound of Joel’s innards when she pulled him up off the metal. The things that she had caused, they made a weight in her chest that she dragged with her every day.   
And the way it had stabbed at her when she saw them, making chasms in her flesh that reached with such depth and such violence into her she swore they could never be filled.

The blood had run into the water then, making it pink and brown and sickly. She was left painted in white and grey, until again she began to cool and her skin wrinkled.   
The pistol was in the sink beside her.  

When she pulled herself out, she thought about cleaning some of the clothes she’d found, in case Joel was up and about later and wanted to change. Perhaps he should, the shirt he wore still stunk of antiseptic.

Ellie drained the bathwater and pulled some clean clothes on.

In the wardrobe at the back, there was a black jumper hanging up.   
It was far too big for her, but still the softest thing she’d felt in a long time. It was something a father would wear, maybe her father had worn something like this once.   
It looked like that sort of thing. Maybe when it was raining or the heating went out they’d given it to their kid to wear and rolled up the sleeves for them. There was a rare kind of assurance in the world that only a father can give to their child, which seemed to pass beyond anything said or done. But it was things like this, the piece of clothing in her hands, that contained it so wholly that she swore not even the men and the monsters waiting out there could touch it. Ellie pulled it into her chest and breathed in the smell. It didn’t smell like anything.

It was time to go back downstairs.

On the coals of the fire, the tins of beans were still cooking and she curled up nearby while she waited for them.

Joel might have been tossing and turning, and mumbling as he sometimes did when he slept, but she couldn’t get him to wake.

“Your loss,” she told him, wolfing down the contents of the second tin too. Eating so fast would give her stomach ache in the night. Who cared when they were that hungry?

The girl fell back onto the other settee.

With her hands knotted over her stomach, she watched the last of the embers burn down to nothing.

The room was black as pitch, except the outline of Joel lit up in white moonlight. What time was it?

“Way past your bedtime,” she could imagine him saying.

The man was lying on his side. One of his arms was falling slowly, and she felt the urge to do something about it, not that it’d do any good.

She rested her head against the jumper and wrapped her arms around her chest. That was everything she needed to protect herself, that and the 9mm waiting by the fireplace.

There was a bed waiting for her upstairs, but by the time she woke up in the morning she found she was curled up in the Joel’s shadow.  


	2. Chapter 2

Joel had fallen to the ground. It made a thud through the floorboards that woke the girl, curled stiff like a day old body with her teeth clenched together.

It was only a drop of one foot, but it sent echoes of fresh pain through him inside, making him cry out like something feral, until she ran over and took him by the shoulders.

“Joel? Please . .”

“Ellie,” he breathed.

His face was furrowed and his eyes closed.

He grasped his shirt to regain himself, it was too late though, the way he sat there; a newborn dying before it had the chance to live, a monument turned to ruins or some old worship left behind as history hurtled onwards. Men should not fall to pieces. They shouldn’t seem so fragile.

He looked young again, when his mortality had dropped him from its careless hand and Ellie was trying to scrape the shards back together on the floorboards. If they cut her, she might have cried.

But she had to stay together, for him, for now. While the snowstorm was howling at the delicate walls they had built from brick and mortar and naive beliefs of sanctuary.

“You’ve gotta’ get up,” she said, pulling him up onto the seat. He fell back with a groan.

The pain was manifesting over the muscles of his stomach, his blood drying into a wretched imagining of Rorschach. And the girl reached for it to trace the congealed strings.   
It looked like a sleeping child, smelled like spirits and gauze. She pulled the blanket up over him; she did not want to look at it anymore. Her peculiar fascination vanished before her eyes.

It was time to get moving.  “Alright,” she said, grabbing their bags.

First of all, she should sort through everything they had left.

There were a few arrows in Joel’s pack, a piece of bandaging, one shiv and some rope.

There were no rounds left in any of guns, they’d have to make do. She found some old notes of guard shifts in his jacket and a couple of stray comic books in her bag.

Gather more food, that was most important, make sure they had water before they moved on.

Taking the shiv from her pocket, she put it in Joel’s hand. Just in case.

 “I won’t be far away,” she promised.

She checked that the furniture was set against the doors and windows and checked them again, before leaving through the back door. The key, she kept that on a string around her neck.   
At least from the outside it looked deserted. That’ll do, she told herself, that’ll keep him safe, until she believed it. She never really did.

Outside, the snow had finally settled. The dead trees of the forest were scored black and white, between the occasional flash of colour from birds or martens. That usually meant there was nobody else about.

It only took a few feet before she stumbled on something.

The clicker. In a grave of dead leaves and ice. Only its hands had broken the surface, curled in the way that even the most horrible creatures will try and hang on to life. They still breathed, after all. Ellie shook it off. Enough about the dead.   
And the dread in the air was humming around them. Between her and the body, a miasma was poisoning the sacred, cotton-white earth.

Their whispers must still have had something to say. His father promising him he’d be alright. His mother’s prayers. And where had they run off to that the abomination they had locked away was forgotten?

Focus, Ellie, she told herself. Her cheeks were crimson in the cold.

From the shed, Callus had drooped his head over the door, framed in the snow around him. He had picked up on her unease. Animals were like that sometimes.

Ellie carried out a pot of water for him to drink. “You stay here,” she told him, her arms around his neck. “I’m gonna’ find us some food.”

Underfoot, the virgin earth crunched softly, into the dressing of the leaves buried half a foot beneath her. It was quiet, but all at once on edge, like a cemetery that people no longer walked through, but swore that black dogs did.   
There were eyes on her back there too, or perhaps it was her paranoia, that kept an arrow nocked to her bow the whole time.

It was a vast place that wood; a beautiful one, still gleaming blue in the feverish cold, where the trees shivered their ancient backs and the crows swept down at things she could not see. The girl was dwarfed there. Pines as old as two or three hundred years grew impossibly high, some twisted and corrupt from the frost.   
She could imagine the aching forms of giants walking through or some lost creature from a book she once read, that had emerged from the air of the storm and was walking past the firs and redwoods, touching the top leaves with its hands. This was not the time for daydreaming.

She shouldn’t have stopped like that.

Ellie was in the clearing of a glade with the bowstring loose and her eyes set upwards. How long had she been there? Daylight was too short for her.

She pushed onwards. In a place like that there was no escape from the surety that she was being watched. You just have to keep walking, under the weight of it, with every step.

After trailing a sunken river for a time, she stopped on a little bridge to tighten her shoelaces. Moss had covered the wire laid there, only the frost was so severe there were just a few black rings left on the planks.

She straightened up. It was quite a pretty place; she allowed herself a moment to take in the sight of the river’s path and the glistening wounds of ice it had left behind.

The body hanging from the tree creaked on its rope. Her eyes reached his, the gaunt, gaping hollows of his skull. Her breath hitched. The way his skull was turned, he might have been crying. It looked like shame.

For a heartbeat she reached to cut it down and she had no idea why. Ellie left her knife by her side.   
It was tied to a bough on the north side. If she’d have carried on a little further, she might never have seen it.

The man was above the bed of the river by a span of four or five feet. His hands weren’t bound, this wasn’t a lynching, and there were the tatters of a bag left beneath him.

Ellie dropped to the river bed. Animals had pulled at the leather of the bag a long time ago. There was no food and no medicine, just a few rounds for a revolver. She put them in her breast pocket.

There didn’t need to be a note or some empty explanation of why men do the things that they do. It may have just been a child’s intuition that could almost retrace the sorrow in the corpses rest, or the man’s hands on the rope as he pulled it over the branch.  

This man had had a child. He had not even gone a mile from the house, before the world had been too much, his own hands too overwhelming, that the only thing he could do to understand it was to not think of it anymore at all.

With one last look at the body, she scaled the bank, and carried on along her way.

There was a buried trail from the house that ran north, ending half a mile from a settlement since invaded by woodland.  

There was an oak growing in the middle of a fountain and splitting the forgotten marble. In summertime, ivy flourished on the walls in bloody delight, and blossom hung along the doorways and windows.

Ellie waited on the outskirts of the place for nearly half an hour before going any closer.

Knelt in the snow, she watched every door and window and road that there was. There were only a few houses and sheds.   
Nobody had been through since the morning except for the crows, moving in dotted tracks to look for food. Things were never so different for her. She checked her watch. Half past twelve.

Ellie moved towards the first house. Didn’t seem right, Joel not being there.

She patted her belt to check the knife was there.

The doors to the cellar were unlocked, and Ellie dropped a stone in before her to see if anything stirred. There was only her breathing, clouding the air. When she and Riley were younger they’d do the same to pretend they were smoking.

Ellie turned on her torch and climbed down. 

It would have been bare in the cellar if not for the old metal frames and paint cans stacked about. The gush of air that followed her through knocked them over, making her almost send an arrow through a tin can.

Ellie let out a breath. There was nobody there, there hadn’t been for a long time.

But she stopped at the staircase for the eyes – eyes, sharper than hers, brighter too – tracking her every step. There was only the blue gap of the cellar doors. There better be, she thought.

Ellie went up to the house. She would give them hell before letting them get between her and Joel.

As she walked, the muscles over her temples tightened and her mouth twitched.   
She would give them hell, she’d send an arrow through their throat, now she’d learnt how to fight with every bit of fire in her belly. Ellie stopped. Her thoughts were twisting, darker, rooting through her mind and perhaps that was how it felt – that darkness – to be infected. Perhaps they could not keep those thoughts from their mind.

There was nobody in the house. With the bow on her back, she kept the knife in hand, in case she missed something but there didn’t seem to be a ghost left with her.

Ellie pulled a map from a cabinet downstairs. “Nice.” It showed her all the surrounding area, the whole span of woodlands from the university to the highway. She put it away in her bag.

In the bedroom was an old collection of books in a small library. After all those years, it still smelt like a library should. Or the rest of world had just turned to dust too.

There wasn’t anything but law books though, and she hoped she’d never be that bored.

Weeds had begun to creep through the hallways, daffodils and the like, patient for the sun to reach them. There were mushrooms in the fireplace.

Even more of the next house was lost in disarray and more natural hands were putting the pieces back together. The fridge refused to open, until she took a spatula from the draw to prize it. The door hit the wall with a thud.

Instinctively, she ran to check the windows. Just the trees.

“Oh shit,” she said. The handle was buried in the wall, pinning the fridge open.

Ellie looked back at the spatula. “What does he mess around with guns for?”  
 It was worth the time though, to fill her bag with a few spare bottles and some of those sealed bars probably twenty years out of date. Joel told her to pick them up though. They tasted alright to her.

The rest of the houses were much the same. It didn’t seem like they’d been looted, just that whoever lived there had taken everything with them. At least they had something to eat tonight.

“Should check the sheds,” she thought aloud.

There was something behind her. The girl turned on her heels, knife already pointed outward.

Two amber eyes glared back.

The fox crouched, its ears back, and began to step away from her.

Ellie was shaking – not with fear, though, it must have been anger. Hatred, whatever she wanted to call it.

The girl lowered her arm. Slowly, the fox’s tensed legs unfolded and – unruffled – it began to walk away. She ran to the door.

Its tail disappeared between the trees, and it vanished into the nothingness. She wondered if she’d see it again. She never would.

The last place she checked was a tool shed by the tree line. Inside – a small fortune – a box of nails and screws, a little bit of oil and a tin matchbox. There were a few left inside.

Not many people had been this way, not even in all this time. It was just another part of the forest now.

After that, Ellie turned back in the direction of the home. She might have circled the rest of the place, but the sky was darkening over that way and she swore she heard the sound of something moving between the trees below. Was that her giant creature? It didn’t seem so fantastical any more. The rain in the air smelt like danger.

Retracing her steps, there were the stiff tracks of the fox close by. Nothing else though, no humans. Not everything in the world was out to get her. But being there and being alone made it hard to remember. It was beginning to rain. She picked up the pace.

It seemed an impossible distance in the cold, with the promise of a warm fire the loveliest for a while. To be under a roof, to sleep beside a fire, that was what made a home. And Joel’s breathing, bloody, stripped, cutting through her dreams. That was a home they made. Didn’t matter where it was, at the end of the day.

Callus was watching the woods for her return. She fed him and scratched behind his ears, then closed the door for the night. Inside, there was no sign of any disturbance.

Ellie checked the front room – just Joel, where she’d left him that morning. Upstairs, every room was still and the even creaking of the house showed it was very much alive.

She rested at last when the fire was going. It was only a small one, so it didn’t make too much smoke.

The man was asleep.

“Found a map,” she told him, laying it out on the table, “and some food, and . . . these.”

The handful of bullets hit the table. “Left in someone’s house. At least that’s something.” She was sat with an elbow on her knee. The warmth was gracing her fingers back from their numb, ebbing death. She’d hung her jacket near the fire, even though it made it smell like smoke, and her gloves close by.

She spent the rest of the night waiting, waiting for the rain to come hit the window, but it never did. The clicker’s body outside was on her mind. It seemed like cruelty to her. And who were those people, that couldn’t let a child die?


	3. Chapter 3

The fever began on the fourth day; Joel had lost any hold on time, and he mistook the hours for days of hellish fire and nights of insufferable frost. It was all he knew by then, the seasons’ turmoil in his chest that he had become lost in.

Ellie did not know what to do but watch in silence. She gave him water, offered him food, kept the blankets clean and dry, knowing all the while that without medicine she was only prolonging the infection.

Sometimes Joel would say her name: they were what he remembered, her and Tess and his family.

He swore he heard Sarah in the chambers of his dreams. She was never there.

When he looked for her, his eyes blinded by fire, he could only catch snatches of the snow and the night sky and a broken watch. Time had stopped moving that day.   
The limbo he found himself in for the passing decades was being burned out of him, and more often than not he begged for Ellie and not his daughter to come find him.

And Ellie was always there – watching over the fire, leant against him on the horse. Even when he was asleep she’d speak to him like things were just the same.

“Look at that,” she said, drawing Callus to a halt.

They had been in the shadow of a ridge, on the westernmost point of the forest. There was a cabin up on the hillside. Perhaps it was a ski lodge. She thought she’d heard of those. Out of instinct the girl looked over her shoulder to ask Joel, but his pallid, petrified skin and grey lips burned an image in her mind that worse than the horrors of the infected. Some diseases killed quickly and some did not know mercy. Holding the reins tighter, Ellie spurred them on.

There was an old cavern at the foot of the hill that had been used a long time a gone, by a hibernating bear, or some other creature that had perished before her time.

The frozen water made pools of silvered rainbows in its gullies, an old spectrum from the saltine earth.

At the back – where the water had not touched the stone – she left Joel beneath blankets and tarpaulin. He felt as cold as death.

Ellie took the time to surround the tarp with snow before she left, with the weight of the setting sun descending on her. She needed to hurry up if they wanted to get out of there. There might be people up in the lodge.

Her doubts were only instinct though. Nobody, living or dead, had stepped foot in there for a long time.

A mounted elk watched her cross the room. On the tip of her toes, she could meet the glassy, tormented eye of the deer. Ellie panned her torch over it. It looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights, something Joel had once said, and the thoughtless display of the bust cemented that destiny forever. She didn’t want to look at it any more.

Ellie scuffed her shoes across the floor, but there were no clickers to wake up, not in any of the rooms.

She used a set of keys to open the doors at the back, which took her to the balcony facing the mountainside.

Exclaiming, she ran to edge to peer over.

Hundreds and hundreds of feet plummeted below her, and from that daredevil stretch she could make out the mirror of a lake a few miles away.   
There were stone arches stretched over the river that spilled out from it, coated in pristine snow and the invasion of the fir trees. Ellie gasped, leant over the railing. Her grip almost slipped, and – breathless – she dropped her feet back on solid ground.

On either side of the walkway were cable cars, so devastated by rust they no longer worked, but the sight of them gave her a pang of melancholy. She wished she could ask Joel about them. She wished that they’d find a working one somewhere.

It rocked violently below her feet.

Ellie stumbled back into the doors. With a groan, it only swung back to its rest. She took the handholds for reassurance, with only two inches of metal and the blotted mirrors protecting her from her death.

There was only an hour of sunlight left. The hunters at the university might still be looking for them.

In the lodge, she searched the storage rooms, and found a couple of coats that might have fit her, or that she could pull the down from anyway, and a pair of ski goggles. Whoever had first come to the place had only taken the men’s, which worried her more than if they had taken everything.

Ellie broke open the vending machine glass while she was at it. The food had turned to dust and mould – she took as many drinks as she could carry.

After loading up Callus with everything she’d found, she started out on a haphazard trail buried under neglected years.

At least with a map she had a better chance. Joel let out a stammering breath as she pulled herself up.

“Where are we?” he asked.

Ellie pulled the ski goggles over her eyes. “We’re on our way. Let’s find somewhere to sleep tonight.”

The cabin would be a warm place to stay, only it could be seen miles away because of its sheer height, and she’d feel better sleeping somewhere they wouldn‘t be found.

They were led with caution through the thinning forest.   
In the dying light Ellie thought she saw a clicker and loosed the arrow to its head. It had only been the remains of a birch tree, twisted by the weather.

Taking the switchblade from her belt, she had managed to dislodge the shaft, which the stump had seized with ferocity.

It was not a mile from the hill that they entered the grates of a sewer.

There, at last, she could lock the doors behind them with steel, and guard the entrance if need be.

Callus didn’t like it underground, the putrid air stirred his habit of unease, as it did to all prey down there, and Ellie had to dismount and take the reins.

There was nothing left down there, not to the naked eye.

In the span of a torch shadows would lunge all of a sudden, but only if they were expected to, and the girl had to consciously slow her heartbeats so she did not give them away.   
Joel shivered on the back of the horse.   
No matter her reasoning a viral panic has set into her nerves. It had not paralysed them, as they continued their descent, like blinded soldiers traipsing over enemy lines. That was how she felt: hands bound by bandaging, her breath shattering the murk.

This was no place to die, this staircase down to a kind of hell, where her bones would not be found. Every second carried the chance that it would come crawling into their sight. She would not take that gamble.

They came into view slowly. Horror was in their eyes, and their hearts were bestial. They looked so much like victims; the cold had turned them stiff as ice and rooted them to the spot, where they shrieked at her, silent as the dead, praying like all creatures for the turn of summer where they would run and reap and terrify.

Ellie shone the light over the clickers. A covering of frost had spread over them. One was curled up on the balls of its feet, baring its teeth to the dominance of nature and its inevitability.

Her fear thinned in her lungs.

Not even the foetal contortions of the infected could hurt her then.

Ellie pulled the horse through the bodies watching them. They left the sculptures standing there, and at the end of the tunnel she pushed across the bolts of the door, just in case. Just in case, it was all they ever said. She could not close her eyes without it.

In the old boiler room that they had found, Ellie laid down their blankets and the saddle, and they slept through that bitter night side by side.

-

“What are you doing?” Joel asked.

It was early in the morning – or at least he thought so. He could hear the rain pattering down the leaves, he could smell the drizzle in the air.  

Nearby, Ellie had been shuffling about, swearing every once in a while; his eyes managed to settle on the girl knelt across from him.

“Making a compass,” she said, not looking up. There was a needle in her hand, a cork in the other.

Joel tried to sit up but the pain shivered through him.

“D’you even know how to do that?”

She shoved her hands in her pockets to warm them. “Riley told me how, a while ago. I just have to remember.” Her frown deepened, around her fierce, wild eyes, and he went to reach out and help her the pain hit him like lightening, and his head fell back to the hands of the fever.

It was storming his body and lighting his nerves on fire: against the blistering cold he had never felt so close to his fatality. Joel reached for his stomach.

He pulled away the blanket and the coat, he tore his shirt apart and grasped his bandaging – it was bruised with old blood and the colour of disease.   
There came the plague of the infection leaching out of him. Ellie had stitched him back together. The juvenile, imperfect lines. The shaking hands. His blood was everywhere. Joel felt sick to the bottom of his stomach, where he could see – glistening – the lining of his innards.

“Oh, God.” It was Ellie, beside him. She was wrapping him up again. “Do you wanna’ freeze to death?”

“I’m burnin’ alive.” He ground down on his teeth.

Flustered with panic, she pulled the coat back over him and sat him against the tree.   
Crouched on her feet, she rocked back and forth, wondering what to do. In the end, she left him to his unconsciousness and started on the compass again. It took her a while, much longer than it should have, but she did it.

Ellie flattened the map over her knees. They were at the edge now, she judged, checking against the contour lines and the water they’d passed.   
The day before she marked the spots where she’d seen clickers; they had gravitated towards the settlements, where there was a better chance of finding people, and since traversing the woods she hadn’t seen one. That was something, that was something. She had her chin in one hand and the compass in the other.

If they carried on the way they were going, they would only be a day away from the highway, or half that if they could find a bridge over the lake. That was the end of the territory. She had spent so long studying the map she hadn’t thought of what would happen once they left. Ellie glanced up at Joel. He hadn’t stirred since.

If they stayed there in the woods, they might be safe, for a while, living off rabbits and canned foods and anything she might dig up. But all the houses there had been cleared a long time ago. There was no medicine for Joel – hell it might be too late for that anyway. Perhaps she could look for the Fireflies, for Marlene. They were the only people she knew that were doctors.

Ellie kicked out the fire and gathered their things. Callus – who had been eating the last of his oats – was already saddled up.

With the bow over her back, Ellie mounted and took the reins.

It was noon by the time they reached the lake. The black water was frothing over the ground, it looked rabid to her.

She walked to the edge of a pier growing from the bank. Moss had covered the length of it, bleached white from autumn, like a pattern of colourless eyes following her. Callus shook his head.

Her hand found the rope knotted to the pier. Coiling it, she pulled up the boat waiting in the water. Ellie let out a breath. Their luck must have been turning.

She first checked the boat for any holes with a learned meticulousness, then she shook Joel half-awake, and got him to clamber down to the stern.   
By his feet she dropped the saddle, with their blankets in the waterproof bag, her backpack and his, the bow and guns and torches.   
Ellie kept her knife at hand. She always did.

“Here we go, I guess.”

Ellie led Callus down to the water. She knew that horses could swim, somewhere in the back of her mind, but she had never seen it, and in the nervous moments before he stepped into the lake she was doubting it herself.

Once he had overcome the cold though, he stayed beside them across the water as Ellie took the oar.   
It was a mile across – not as great a distance as going around – but in the cold, on an empty stomach it was becoming an ordeal. More than anything, it was the certainty that if she made a mistake, she would be sent down to the water and begin to drown. Only there would be no end, not this time, Joel would sink quietly beside her and the coal hands would drag her down. There was no saviour above the water to pull her out at the last minute.

She shivered. God, it was cold. When they were halfway across she paused to let the blood return to her arms. Joel began to mumble in his sleep, and shift about as he did.

Ellie reached for the sides of the boat. It stilled – for a second - before he moved again. The water nearly went over the side. Her stomach lurched.

She took a fistful of his coat to stop him.

Joel dropped a little, his expression deepening.

“You are not my daughter,” he recited, his eyes flickering about.

Ellie recoiled. She sat with the oar across her knee, her head hung low.

In the middle of the water, a silence overcame them, in which even the clouds seemed to draw further away.

The girl did not move for a while.   
Those days that had passed, they were the dogs days. They were some of the worst she had known. But the fire in her heart had not burned out, for all the pain and the exhaustion and the fear – the fear was greater than she knew possible.

It was peaceful out on the water.

Something was dying in her chest, down to an ember.

Ellie did not breathe. It seemed too natural then, and some things she did not have the heart for anymore.

The water was carrying them away slowly. Her arms were crossed over the side, where she stared down at the impossible depths. Her reflection stared back at her.

In the distance, a robin began to sing from a treetop. She heard it break through the autumnal melancholy.   
Ellie stayed still on the edge, wondering how far they would go before she tipped to boat, wondering how much further they would have to walk to find them. She was so weary, she felt like she had aged years since they left.

The robin on the branch had stopped singing, and flew away. There were miles to go.

Pulling her hands out of the water, she took the oar again, and began to break through the mindless waves.

She was more heart than girl.

On the other side, the wind had dropped, or maybe the trees there were shielding them. Callus was still dripping even though she’d done her best to dry him with a blanket. His skin kept ticking as if pinched. The wind out there might be his death sentence.

Ellie scratched up the sand with her shoes. The map was sitting in the boat, which had been hauled up to the shore. She thought that she could taste blood in her mouth but it was only the salt from the water.

It was seeping through the roots of the trees, melting the ground maddeningly. Without a word, the small band of travellers headed onwards, through the last of the thickets and the copses, over a stone bridge to the barren fields.

The highway was only a single stretch of road in the middle of nowhere; they could turn one way or the other. Callus came to an uncertain halt.

Ellie’s eyes were bright with tears. She pulled them round south, and she did not look back.


End file.
